Girl Guides Go Google

Today’s guest post is by Wendy Lewis, CEO of Girl Guides Victoria. The Girl Guides is a global movement, and in Australia, a not-for-profit organisation that supports girls from five years of age, equipping them with skills, confidence and friendships to help them to succeed throughout their lives.


Girl Guides Victoria celebrated its centenary anniversary last year, a significant milestone appreciated by over so many women who have been Girl Guides since 1911. The growth of the organisation continues and today, Girl Guides Victoria has 1,200 members and volunteers, 400 supporters and 5000 girls involved in programs right across the state.

Our centenary has also prompted us to reflect on how to ensure that the next 100 years are just as successful and part of staying relevant and up-to-date means being equipped with the right technology that can future-proof us as we move forward. We wanted to keep our connection to the grassroots of the organisation while still allowing advanced functionality and productivity in our administration. Going Google was the first step in streamlining our operations and creating a more efficient communication platform across the organisation.

So far, we’ve transitioned 100 Girl Guide leaders to Google Apps in locations across our 79 Victorian districts. With an older demographic of volunteers, it was essential that we had a solution that was intuitive to learn and easy to use. After a little bit of instruction we were all using it proficiently and since then discovering a new trick always proves exciting.

We use Google Apps as an email service as well as for sharing and collaborating on documents that help run the organisation across the state. It has transformed the way our geographically disparate organisation can share education programs and essential safety information. For example, we use Google Talk for instant communication. This means that our volunteers are able to access information or contact details for a girl’s family in the event of an emergency, or keep up to date with planned activities and contingency plans instantly. The fact that they can access this information from any of their personal devices like phones and tablets is vital for their roles which are often in the field, literally!

For Girl Guides Victoria, the girls are our top priority, so having the best technology to support what we do seamlessly has been most beneficial for us. We are now looking to expand on our initial success with Google Apps, finding simple and cost effective ways to extend what we do, for example, by offering online learning and promoting the involvement of parents through online portals.

Going Google has given us the tools to strengthen our commitment to push, challenge and grow the girls in our program.

Posted by Wendy Lewis, CEO of Girl Guides Victoria.

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To ping or not to ping?

Posted by Christine Knight, Creative Maximiser

New starters at Google invariably find themselves surrounded by new terms, acronyms and ways of conducting business – including using instant messenger as a regular form of communication. We favour using our own IM applications – Google Talk and Gmail Chat – over email to quickly “ping” each other work-related messages and questions. As well as being a fast and instant way to connect and get a reply, it helps bridge the gap between international offices.


With many Australian businesses using IM as a standard form of work communication, a whole range of new etiquette issues have arisen! (I find email etiquette easy to navigate in comparison to good IM manners).

Besides the easy-to-do accidental IM-ing disasters (“I pinged the wrong person!” is a common moan heard around the office), the instant, casual nature of instant messaging applications has brought with it a minefield of questions as to IM etiquette.

Straight from the Australian Googlers’ mouths, here are a few tips you also might find useful from our office IM experiences.

1. The “I’m busy” sign. It generally means that the person is busy. Don’t IM them to say “I know you're busy, but...”.

2. Having a long/personal/meaningful message in the status bar. Remember that your co-workers will all see it. You might be the biggest Grey’s Anatomy fan in the country, but having “McDreamy Is Mine” as your IM status might not go down so well with your boss.

3. If you’re out of office, set your status to reflect your location. Those five seconds will be well spent when it means you won’t get co-workers bugging you to attend training in the Sydney office – when you’re actually in London that week.

4. Setting the status to "I'm so incredibly busy don't even think about IMing me". If you're really that busy, you should probably sign out!

5. Take advantage of the great features like the ability to set a “nickname” or “alias” instead of using the user’s actual email address. For example, your friend’s name/alias is “K007kid”, you can just make it display as "Steve" on your end and stop those “who on earth is that again?” moments.

6. It’s great to get instant attention and feedback from colleagues when matters are urgent, especially when dealing with colleagues in other countries and time zones. But if it’s going to require you writing an essay, put it in an email.

7. Begin your chat with “Do you have minute?” or, “Need to ask you a quick question”, rather than diving straight into the topic. Think of it like having a conversation with someone in person. If you wouldn’t say it to their face, don’t say it over IM.

8. IMing complicated questions to the person who sits behind you. Come on now. It’s not that hard to just turn around.

To finish up, here is a heart-warming story of how one Googler used IM to (accidentally) find love. Remember it next time you ping the wrong person and wish there was a “Ctrl Z” function for IM. You never know where that random ping may lead!

“My would-be fiancé had started working in my office a few days before, and I'd added her as an IM contact. One day I sent a “funny” IM to an old friend, with an alphabetically similar name. I realised quickly that I'd sent it to her, and rereading it, I realised that it was something that really shouldn't be said to someone you've just met. It was pretty horrible. Unexpectedly, however, it ended up breaking the ice. That was four years ago, and we get married next September.”

See more at the Google Talk blog.

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